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True, but at the very least they should keep the support for XMPP they had until now and make an effort to publish specs (not as standards, but as public docume

True, but at the very least they should keep the support for XMPP they had until now and make an effort to publish specs (not as standards, but as public documents), such that at the very least we can have third-party clients and not leave it up to third-parties to reverse-engineer the protocol badly, violating some TOS in the process. Or at least commit to doing it in the future at some point. Nobody's rushing them into doing it right now, but changes such as these create anxiety. I mean, what next? Are they going to drop POP3/SMTP support from GMail or something?

tptacek 13y ago
If it costs $X dollars to retain XMPP support and $Y dollars to build their new offering out and their budget can't accomodate both $X and $Y, then the choice is indeed between progress and placating standards advocates. I can't imagine a standards issue I would care less about (among standards I routinely use) than Google Mail dropping POP3 support, unlikely as that may be. Most mail users are better served by web interfaces. POP3 and IMAP are archaic. People that want those interfaces have plenty of options for maintaining them. You have never had more freedom in how you can avail yourself of technology than you do in 2013, no matter how many restrictive app stores and giant email providers you choose to concern yourself with. (I don't mean that to sound snide.)
- bad_user 13y ago
  These standards, archaic as they may be, also allow you to export your emails should you want to. I pay for my wife's Yahoo email account, such that GMail can use POP3 to connect to it and retrieve the emails that she gets on that account. Not to mention that email clients work best if native. iOS users didn't have to wait for Google to release a half-baked client for them. As an alternative, of course, we can do better than POP3 or IMAP. Sure, lets burn them, but name an alternative first and it has to be a standard supported by Google, no? I can't believe that you think this. You're basically arguing for the sake of arguing. Btw, you're mentioning "web interfaces". How would you have liked it if everybody had their own browser-like app, communicating through their own http-like protocol, speaking their own language for hyper-linked documents?
  - tptacek 13y ago
    If you think I'm just arguing for the sake of arguing, let's you and I just stop arguing.

tptacek 13y ago

If it costs $X dollars to retain XMPP support and $Y dollars to build their new offering out and their budget can't accomodate both $X and $Y, then the choice is indeed between progress and placating standards advocates. I can't imagine a standards issue I would care less about (among standards I routinely use) than Google Mail dropping POP3 support, unlikely as that may be. Most mail users are better served by web interfaces. POP3 and IMAP are archaic. People that want those interfaces have plenty of options for maintaining them. You have never had more freedom in how you can avail yourself of technology than you do in 2013, no matter how many restrictive app stores and giant email providers you choose to concern yourself with. (I don't mean that to sound snide.)

bad_user 13y ago
These standards, archaic as they may be, also allow you to export your emails should you want to. I pay for my wife's Yahoo email account, such that GMail can use POP3 to connect to it and retrieve the emails that she gets on that account. Not to mention that email clients work best if native. iOS users didn't have to wait for Google to release a half-baked client for them. As an alternative, of course, we can do better than POP3 or IMAP. Sure, lets burn them, but name an alternative first and it has to be a standard supported by Google, no? I can't believe that you think this. You're basically arguing for the sake of arguing. Btw, you're mentioning "web interfaces". How would you have liked it if everybody had their own browser-like app, communicating through their own http-like protocol, speaking their own language for hyper-linked documents?
- tptacek 13y ago
  If you think I'm just arguing for the sake of arguing, let's you and I just stop arguing.